coming home from very lonely places, all of us go a little mad: whether from great personal success,
or just an all-night drive, we are the sole survivors of a world no one else has ever seen. - john le carre

Saturday, February 27, 2010

a quick review from...well, the last time this was on a saturday: in the spirit of "don't complain about something if you're not prepared to do it better," i noticed over the past couple of weeks two lists -- one from wired and one from a blog i know not of called ink-stained amazon which i have to say is beautiful to look at it -- that both purport to be 'essential lists' of 'geek culture' quotes.

ahem.

okay, so the wired list starts off with monty python and the holy grail and the amazon list includes the sarah jane adventures -- but i'm still not wildly impressed with either one.

i figured i could do better.

then i thought about it and realised that, on my own, i didn't have the time to do better so i roped in my ever-patient girlfriend to help me do better. :)

first off, a couple of notes:

1. this is for fun. if you're not amused, go read something else. i won't be offended, promise. that being said, suggestions and additions (politely phrased!) are welcome in the comments. but keep in mind this is installation 1 of 4! not everything will fit in here.

2. these are probably mostly going to be dredged out of my memory, anna's memory, imdb, or official show/movie sites. inaccuracy is, therefore, almost inevitable. not to mention repetition of shows or characters. if this annoys you-- well, make your own list. :)

3. i'm not aiming for some kind of "worst to best" or "best to worst" list. they're here because the two people making the list think they're fun or because one of us was able to strong-arm the other into including them. brief context is provided where anna or i thought it was necessary.

5. i am aiming for 4 posts of 25 quotes each over the next 4 weeks. tune in each friday/saturday for your new installment! and here's the link to the first post, and the second, and the third.

okay, and that being said...

1. The Doctor: "Allons-y!" Pretty much any episode of the new series with David Tennant (we'll miss you, Mr. Tennant, sir.)

7. Spongebob: "I came over to see if you wanted to go jellyfishing, but I can see you're busy having an episode." Spongebob Squarepants, something in the first season...er. I can't admit to remembering the name of this episode but nothing from Chef! or Red Dwarf -- I just can't!

8. Han Solo: "Hey -- it's me." Star Wars: Return of the Jedi.

9. Jared Grace: "I was reading in a footlocker!" The Spiderwick Chronicles.

10. Sarah Connor: "Do I look like the mother of the future? I can't even balance my checkbook!" Terminator.

11. Danny Archuleta: "It has not been a nice day!" Predator 2.

12. Ianto Jones: "Because I know everything. Also, it's written on the bottom of the screen there." Torchwood and I am ashamed to say, but I have no idea which episode it's from. ... Second season? Maybe? Oh, help.

13. Son of Mine: "He never raised his voice. That was the worst thing - the fury of the Time Lord - and then we discovered why. Why this Doctor, who had fought with gods and demons, why he had run away from us and hidden. He was being kind." Doctor Who, "Family of Blood."

14. Sarah Jane Smith: "There are two types of people in the world. There's people who panic -- and then there's us. Got it?" The Sarah Jane Adventures, "Invasion of the Bane."

19. Willow Rosenberg: "The library. Y'know -- where the books live?" Buffy the Vampire Slayer, "Welcome to the Hellmouth."

20. Reverend H.W. Smith: "This is God's purpose, but not knowing the purpose is my portion of suffering." Doc Cochran: "If this is His will, He is a son of a bitch." Deadwood. Sometime around the end of the first season.

21. Carmen Ghia: "May I take your hats? And your swastikas?" The Producers.

Saturday, February 20, 2010

not that it's really inconvenient, but this is cross-posted from anna's blog yet again because, well, my wrist hurts and i had a remarkably depressing friday and i asked her -- nicely! -- to write something for today...and she did.

Okay, okay, so it's not like we think there are legions of fans out there waiting with baited breath for the forth installment of our 100 movie quotes endeavor (see parts one,two, and three for a refresher), but still: we apologize for the fact that we are delaying the post for another week. Hanna has been working industriously all week transcribing the terrible handwriting of ninteenth-century medical photographers and her wrist has become (as they would have said back then) overstrained. It needs bedrest and a cold compress. And a day or two away from typing -- even fun typing.

So instead I bring you a few movie-related links that will hopefully brighten your weekend, and Hanna has volunteered to augment my ramblings with some deftly-chosen youtube clips (minimal typing required). So here we go.

If you're looking for list-type things to read, wander on over to debontherocks @ Blogher, who put up a post this week of her nominations for "the Opposite Oscars," where "we could call out the performances and films that aspired for greatness, but turned out to not even be worth the popcorn required to survive them." While I am not particularly partisan in terms of the films she nominates (most of which I have not seen), I enjoyed this description of the ceremony:

Nominees could attend in their jeans or yoga pants, grab a boxed lunch from the folding table by the door, and wait expectantly to see who was dubbed worst. The loser could then tell off the people who led them to that bad performance, they could nurse their wounds, or just apologize. "I needed the money to pay a bad IRS debt/lift-tuck the twins after breastfeeding the real twins/buy back a digital video camera I inadvertently left in a South Beach hotel room," they would say. And we might understand, or we might cluck and boo, but at least we'd have resolution.

debontherocks would probably appreciate (if she has not already read) what might just be the best movie review of the year, to date. Actually, I'm quite sure it's the best movie review I've read several years running. Although I feel a bit diminished, as a human being, for writing that since it's a total pan of a film that I haven't even seen, the romantic comedy Valentine's Day. Sady Doyle @ The Guardian writes:

The cumulative effect of Valentine's Day is to make you feel that all human emotions are shameful. Have you ever been sad about a break-up? Had a crush on someone? Wanted your ex-lover back? Been happy to meet somebody promising? Wanted to have sex? You are terrible. You are feeling the same emotions portrayed in the movie Valentine's Day. And these emotions, Valentine's Day confirms, are cheap, and disgusting. For they make you like the characters in this movie.

I mean, wow. That's quality panning.

If this is really the effect of Valentine's Day then it deserves to be panned. Because, you know what? Human emotions aren't shameful. And any movie that makes us feel they are is a disservice to the craft. In fact, I'm a firm believer in movies doing quite the opposite: giving us space in which to witness and experience human emotions (light, dark, and all the shades between) without embarrassment. For example, here's some quality romance, brought to you by the team who were also responsible for that near-perfection of a film, Love Actually.

(Hanna says I am required to warn you that tissues will be needed to watch this scene.)

I will love John Hannah forever for this scene (well, and for his character in The Mummy, but this primarily since it was the first role I ever saw him in, and he made me cry).

Speaking of things that have made me cry recently (I didn't realize this post was going to be so teary, but there we are -- I promise to end with something more ebullient!), Terry Gross recently interviewed Colin Firth about his Oscar-nominated role in A Single Man.

This, like Valentine's Day, is a film which I have neither seen nor heard very much about, but which after listening to said interview I fear I might never be able to watch. Not, however, because I fear it sucks, but because I fear it does not. In fact, I fear it is brilliant. It is the story of a professor who, in the opening scenes of the film, loses his lover in a car accident, and who struggles to go on living in the aftermath of that loss. Terry Gross plays, toward the beginning of the Fresh Air interview, the scene in which Firth's character recieves word that his lover is dead. The audio alone was enough to make me tear up, sitting there at my desk at work.

Firth, in the interview, likens the story to Joan Didion's memoir describing the loss of her husband, The Year of Magical Thinking, which I likewise know I would love and also know I may never have the strength to read. (For those of you who are tempted to think there's some enobling purpose to suffering, go read Jonathan Romain's recent commentary at the Guardian: "Let's be very clear: there is no divine purpose in suffering whatsoever.")

And because I can't possibly leave you all on a note of such existential despair, here's Colin the Sex God from the aforementioned Love Actually exploring the wilds of Milwaukee with a blackpack full of condoms and an openness to cross-cultural experiences.

Hanna reports there is an urban legend that Kris Marshall refused his paycheck for filming this scene on the grounds that it was just too much fun to count as actual work. I leave it to y'all to decide whether that's true or not.

Have a good weekend. We'll be back next Saturday with more movie fun (and possibly even some movie quotes!)

Friday, February 19, 2010

i'm not a huge olympics watcher. honestly, i'm not a big sports person. while i enjoy watching tennis, figure skating, gymnastics, and so forth, about the only sport i will actively seek out is non-american league soccer. (really, the american team play isn't interesting enough -- they haven't worked out the strategic injury or the dramatic playing to the ref tactics well enough -- there's supposed to be a certain amount of theatre in a good football game!)

but a week or so ago, i was channel-flipping and came across one of the qualifying competitions for the figure skating at the olympics. okay, fine, there was nothing else on and so anna and i hung around and watched the qualifiers -- when the music was good and the commentators not being so snarky, that is. (and talk about snarky -- i've stopped watching the olympic coverage because the commentators are being straight up nasty! really, people, have more coffee or less coffee or something.)

anyway, back to the qualifiers for the ice skating -- on the whole, i'm really glad we hung out because we came across my new favorite thing which is an american figure skater named johnny weir. if you've all heard of him before and are sick of him, i do apologise for the repetition, but bear with me.

because nbc is being something of a spoilsport, i can't work out how to find a clip of his performance from this year's olympics which presumably was -- last night? the night before? sometime this week anyway. but i did find this of his short program from 2006:

and that's good, solid stuff -- i can't say i like the music a lot, but it was one of the pieces i had to memorize when i was younger and playing the flute, so i'm probably biased. anyway, so watch that and then watch this:

it's worth it to take 4 minutes and 5 seconds out of your day, if you haven't seen this before or even if you have, really, to enjoy how good this guy is. and the fact that he flirts with everything on or near the ice doesn't hurt him with the crowd at all either.

Tuesday, February 16, 2010

i've gotten behind on prepping posts to go up through the week, so this week and, probably, next week are going to be a bit catch-as-catch-can. i'm hoping to have something exciting and meaningful to post about the new hunger movie that just arrived in the post from netflix, but i don't have the strength to deal with ira hunger strikers tonight, so that's not going to be happening.

instead, i offer up some thoughts about the end of the second season of the sarah jane adventures which anna and i watched last night after putting it off for an ungodly amount of time due to the presence in the second to last episode of one of the nastiest villains -- named the trickster -- the series has produced.it says a lot that, for most of the first and second series, i have total faith that sarah jane can handle just about anything. she's on top of pretty much anything the who universe can throw at her -- and as soon as this guy shows up, i'm praying silently for the doctor to show up and save the day so i will never have to see the trickster and his creepy little sidekick ever ever again.

the trickster has a whole bunch of nasty, well, tricks up his sleeve, but the most unpleasant is his habit of erasing people from time. he's rather like a more proactive version of the blink angels -- with a little handyman, the graske there on the left, to run around and find victims for him. and he looks like that dude down there from pan's labyrinth. which is not okay with me. eyes should be visible at all times. not in palms of hands or hidden behind veils of skin. or whatever it is the trickster has going.

anyway, the second season of sarah jane is pretty kickass. one of our original team members leaves which is very sad, but the new girl, rani, is very awesome. clyde is stepping up in a big way and i'm very glad that he's stayed on as a regular character. luke, too, is turning out to be a great kind of lesser ianto -- i also wish the doctor would show up to meet him. i think they'd probably get on like a house on fire.

if the show has a fault, it's that it tends to get a tad didactic. each show has a message. the quickwitted viewer can pretty much figure it out in the first ten to fifteen minutes and it's never a bad message -- trust yourself; listen to people who love you -- but sometimes it gets a bit heavyhanded. there was an episode with clyde and his father -- heretofore an absent character -- this season which just got to be quite leaden with moral heartiness.

still, for all that, there's often a lesser idea behind the "I learned something today..." lesson that's valuable, too. the episode with clyde, for example, featured his hitherto absentee father turning up and suddenly deciding that he wants clyde's attention and respect -- and manages to inveigle his way into sarah jane's attic and steal a bit of alien tech to do it. this doesn't end well, but it doesn't end awfully either -- it could have been worse. and inside the "your parents love you no matter what" idea was also the "you can rely on yourself, too" idea. it didn't get the premiere place in the show, but it was there.

and, on the whole, the show is a blast to watch. it's fun; it's shiny; it's fast; there are some great villains -- in the sense of being campy fun; and there are some great villains -- in the sense of being quite frightening, too.

Sunday, February 14, 2010

So it's been one of those weeks where every day seems to run from about six am to midnight without a lot of time to stop and pause for breath. Let alone movie quote blogging. So Hanna and (much more tangentially) I are taking a pass this weekend on the final installment of the movie quotes post.

Enjoy the long weekend, sports (if you like that kind of thing) and movies (if you enjoy that). See you back here next Saturday for the concluding installment of "don't ever link those two things again..."

Friday, February 12, 2010

it's friday and, even though i'm writing this on the preceding saturday, i'm predicting that i will probably be a little bit tired by thursday night and not entirely keen on the entire "blogging" phenomenon.

so i'm taking the easy way out and posting a youtube clip.

but perhaps mr. izzard wouldn't have been so out-of-place in the army after all:

Wednesday, February 10, 2010

i'm in the middle of reading thomas levenson's newton and the counterfeiter: the unknown detective career of the world's greatest scientist.

i suppose i should have realised more clearly what levenson's bias was going to be by paying slightly more attention to the post-colon title up there: "the world's greatest scientist." levenson is director of the graduate program at mit and a faculty member in their history of science writing program. i discarded it very quickly because it became clear that their priorities were not mine and, honestly, 19th-20th century ireland were going to cut next to no cheese with them, but the program looks really neat. (and a brief search on the mit website looking for more info about levenson reveals that the program no longer exists under the name i remember, so perhaps the focus has changed since the last time i looked at it.)

levenson writes exceptionally well; if he teaches his students to write like this, that program must be putting out some masterful science writers. his research, too, is solid; he states right up front what sources and collections he has relied on, where he feels the holes are, how he has tried (or failed or not bothered) to fill them, and what implications this might have for his argument. i love this kind of 'lay the cards on the table' attitude in history writers from whatever field. i'm much more likely to nod and go along with someone's argument if i know that they know where the gaps are right up front. there are gaps -- there are always gaps. you simply can't cover everything and that's okay. every history text would be about 12 volumes of 3,000 pages each if everyone tried to be comprehensive all the time. and then a further 12 volumes of footnotes and bibliography.

i have a couple of issues with the book, though. one is that levenson is very dismissive of anyone who isn't newton and newton -- and his radically new vision of the world -- is so clearly an end point for him... "there was newton and then everything was good," could be his attitude summed up in a trite little phrase. i hope that he's taking this reductionist attitude because the book is short, it's clearly meant as a pop history, and he doesn't want to get caught up in the details of debates over newtonian physics. but i find it worrying that he dismisses everyone else working in the same field at the time as being lesser than newton and therefore, implicitly, not as interesting or worthy of attention.

the second -- and more worrying from my perspective because i love print history and intellectual history -- is that, when setting up the conflict between newton (warden of the mint in the late 1600s/early 1700s) and william chaloner (professional forger, cheat, and trickster), levenson is talking about the flood of pamphlets that came out in the late 1690s to suggest ways of fixing the monetary problem in england. basically, the country was out of money. there are all sorts of reasons for this; if you want the entertaining fictionalized version of this, i urge to you read neal stephenson's baroque trilogy -- and then, please, come back and explain it to me.

levenson does a great job explaining the fiscal crisis; i nearly understood it this time 'round! and that fault is mine, not his. i find economics bewildering at the best of times. but one of the key issues in all the (very public) debate and argument surrounding the recoinage of english currency and state support for money and so on was the huge number of pamphlets and the like that got put out by almost anyone with an opinion and money to have the printing done. all sorts of people had suggestions about what should go on, including, at one end of the social spectrum, william chaloner and, for comparison's sake, at the other end, john locke.

so that's all fine and good -- but in the middle of talking about chaloner's pamphlet to suggest what he thinks would be a good idea to fix the mint -- which is really the set-up to an elaborate fraud he wants to run -- levenson suddenly refers to chaloner as being 'illiterate.' now, this may have been meant as a snide joke to point out how snobbish newton was; it may have been an editorial slip that didn't get caught in the final trimming process, but it really struck a sour note i had a hard time getting by. there wasn't any reference in the text to chaloner getting someone else to write the pamphlet for him, or anything like that, so i found the sudden reference to him as 'illiterate' baffling.

i wish i didn't have to return the book to the library tomorrow so i could finish it properly and figure out what was going on. i'll get it back out, of course, to finish it -- if for no other reason than the hope of once-and-for-all figuring out what the hell is going on in stephenson's the confusion -- and because, despite my niggling about it, it really is quite good.

Saturday, February 6, 2010

a quick review from last week saturday: in the spirit of "don't complain about something if you're not prepared to do it better," i noticed over the past couple of weeks two lists -- one from wired and one from a blog i know not of called ink-stained amazon which i have to say is beautiful to look at it -- that both purport to be 'essential lists' of 'geek culture' quotes.

ahem.

okay, so the wired list starts off with monty python and the holy grail and the amazon list includes the sarah jane adventures -- but i'm still not wildly impressed with either one.

i figured i could do better.

then i thought about it and realised that, on my own, i didn't have the time to do better so i roped in my ever-patient girlfriend to help me do better. :)

first off, a couple of notes:

1. this is for fun. if you're not amused, go read something else. i won't be offended, promise. that being said, suggestions and additions (politely phrased!) are welcome in the comments. but keep in mind this is installation 1 of 4! not everything will fit in here.

2. these are probably mostly going to be dredged out of my memory, anna's memory, imdb, or official show/movie sites. inaccuracy is, therefore, almost inevitable. not to mention repetition of shows or characters. if this annoys you-- well, make your own list. :)

3. i'm not aiming for some kind of "worst to best" or "best to worst" list. they're here because the two people making the list think they're fun or because one of us was able to strong-arm the other into including them. brief context is provided where anna or i thought it was necessary.

5. i am aiming for 4 posts of 25 quotes each over the next 4 weeks. tune in each friday/saturday for your new installment! and here's the link to the first post and to the second...

okay, and that being said...

1. Madame Klara Goteborg: "I may have been a distraction to men -- never a burden!" Journey to the Center of the Earth.

7. Nanami Kiryuu: "Oneeeee-samaaaaaaaaaaa...." Shoujo Kakumei Utena, more episodes than I like to remember.

8. Jake of New York: "Go, then. There are other worlds than these." The Gunslinger.

9. Bernard Woolley: "It used to be said that there were two types of chairs for two types of ministers. One sort folded up instantly; the other went round and round in circles." Yes, Minister, "Election Night."

Wednesday, February 3, 2010

short post today (really, i mean it this time) because i must've been sitting funny during my 7.5 hours of data entry today because the muscle of my right shoulder feels like someone's holding a match to it. ow.

anyway, the upshot of today's quick hit -- or whatever you want to call it -- is that cherie priest's boneshaker is quality dystopic steampunk if you find yourself in the mood for that kind of thing.

i thought i knew where there was a review of it on tor.com, but apparently i imagined the whole thing. but, really, she does blog over there -- see? she was a big presence during steampunk month in october -- duh on that one, really -- and i think you can probably follow her on twitter, too, if you're into mild celebrity-stalking.

in any case, boneshaker is the first of priest's novels that i've read and i'm going to go find more. boneshaker is a divided narrative, telling the story of a mother and her son living outside a seattle at the end of the nineteenth century. some years in the recent past, there has been an "accident," releasing poisonous gas from beneath the earth's surface. the gas kills -- and then reanimates. sometimes. in any case, seattle is nowhere anyone now wants to live, but, because the gas is heavy and slow-moving, they walled it in. (yeah, i'm not sure about the science either.)

there isn't a great deal of surprise about the overall arc of the story -- bar the end which was pretty damn cool -- but there are some great characters along the way. i particularly liked the mother, briar. anyone who's response to "yeah, well, your son has disappeared into the poisoned city filled with slowly rotting zombies and there probably isn't any real way to get him out" is to dig out her dad's old leather overcoat and rifle and head out after him has my vote. and if briar doesn't get your attention, hang on 'til lucy shows up. lucy is awesome.

and then there's some eddie izzard 'cause i have to think about french all the time -- well, sort of all the time:

Monday, February 1, 2010

think kind thoughts for me this morning; i'm caught in the justice system of boston, massachusetts.

no, i didn't finally snap and do away with the ever-loud upstairs neighbors or rip the throat from the nth undergrad to bump into me on the t. i got summoned to jury duty and, even as you read this, will be sitting in the dorchester courthouse fervently hoping that all cases on the docket decide to settle without need of me.

just a quickie post this morning, then, to recommend that if you haven't seen the shane acker, tim burton, and timur bekmambetov production 9 -- came out last summer after the debut of district 9 and, i think, suffered from "similarity of title syndrome" -- you really might want to think about it.

personally, tim burton's name was enough to sell me; adding bekmambetov was like adding frosting to an already tasty cupcake; acker was an unknown to me, but i'll be sure to keep an eye out for more of his stuff in the future.

that said, there isn't anything in 9 you probably won't be familiar with. as you probably know from the preview that was freely slung about late in the summer of 2009, the story focuses on 9 rag dolls trying to find out what they can do and what they're supposed to do in the middle of a post-apocalyptic, post-human world. the story relies on familiar themes: there's a journey the characters must take, an innocent hero who has to learn, an evil power that must be bested, friends who have to be rescued in order for the journey to continue, etc., etc. so, from a certain point of view, there isn't anything new here. in fact, if you were feeling in an unkind mood, you could pretty much sit and tear 9 apart frame by frame and label what it takes from terminator, blade runner, 28 days later, mad max, star wars, 2001, and so on. (there also seemed to be a healthy dose of the online comic serial freakangels in there -- it was almost impossible for anna and me to stop identifying the characters in 9 as the freakangels! "so if he's kirk and she's kk...")

if you were feeling unkind, though, you'd be denying yourself a really good movie -- and possibly ruining it for whoever else was in the room at the same time. while there isn't anything new here, the old is recycled in a thoroughly charming, enjoyable, and surprisingly touching way. the voice performances -- including elijah wood, jennifer connolly, and martin landau -- are great and the animation is beautiful to watch. i'm continually amazed at the ability of talented animators -- and animation directors/writers/etc. -- to summon nuanced, delicate performances out of things that don't exist anywhere but on a computer hard drive.